Technical Field
The present disclosure pertains to control of lighting systems and devices, and more specifically, to various control modes for creating decorative light patterns.
Description of the Related Art
The lighting industry is experiencing a renaissance, driven partly by the proliferation of lower power LED light sources, and the application of digital controllers to such low-power lighting systems. It is now possible to fine tune the color, brightness, and timing of lighting arrangements with great accuracy, thus offering a variety of lighting design choices that has not been possible in the past.
By way of illustration, decorative lighting elements (e.g., strands of holiday lights such as Christmas lights) historically were caused to blink on and off by intermittently including in a lighting circuit a high-value resistor, thus blocking current flow downstream to the string of light bulbs. This was accomplished by hard-wiring a “special” control bulb into the circuit that was pre-set to switch on and off at a certain frequency. Such a lighting system is an example of a non-user-programmable system because (a) the only decorative effect option is “blinking” (b) the user must choose between “always blinking” and “never blinking,” by either installing the special bulb or not, and (c) the blinking frequency is fixed, not adjustable.
An alternative way to create light patterns using a light array is to directly control the power at an outlet receptacle. Thus, instead of varying the load voltage or load current locally within the circuit, the power supply itself can be varied via a hard-wired or a pre-programmed control signal. A power control signal may be supplied by, for example, a programmable controller. The controller can be programmed using an EPROM (electrically programmable read-only memory), or a similar programmable integrated circuit chip, to cycle through a prescribed set of signals to produce a sequence of light patterns. Or, the controller can modulate the power supply according to an input signal from another device so that, for example, light patterns can be created in response to sounds or musical rhythms while music is played simultaneously from a radio or a playback device. (see U.S. Pat. No. 7,728,216).
What is needed is an apparatus that removes limitations of existing pre-programmed or hard-wired lighting system controllers in order to offer better control of advanced creative lighting features to end users such as individual consumers, businesses, advertising entities, and the like.